Mozilla is breathing new life into Thunderbird, its desktop email client that many users may think is no longer being actively developed.

Thunderbird will be getting some much needed attention in the coming year, with the Mozilla-backed project planning to hire six new developers — bringing the project's employed headcount to 14 — who will work to make the email client more stable, faster, and easier to use.

According to Thunderbird community manager Ryan Sipes, the team will be working this year to improve Thunderbird's user interface (UI) and user experience, with better Gmail support and native notifications for Windows, Mac and Linux — the three operating systems Thunderbird supports for its 25 million users.

Mozilla is not helping or funding Thunderbird development at all. Nobody remembers their statement in 2015 about "Mozilla would like to stop supporting Thunderbird, calling its continuing maintenance "a tax" on the more important work of developing Firefox."?

Thunderbird became a community lead project that got more independent over the years as they got enough donations to hire full time staff and move to their own infrastructure. Mozilla is now just a legal/financial home for Thunderbird. Basically their lawyers will help, and they'll collect any donations explicitly made for Thunderbird and pass them on to the Thunderbird Council.

Unfortunately Thunderbird is still very dependent upon the Mozilla toolkit (Gecko etc.).